Topics one on one

This is a book written by two French psychiatrists and psychotherapists. It helped me a great deal to understand various people in my family or my circle of acquaintances whose behavior was hard to take at times. The personality types discussed here are: people with anxiety disorders, those with histrionic personality disorder, obsessional personalities, paranoids, narcissists, Type A personalities, schizoids, depressives, dependent, passive-aggressive and avoidant personalities. The authors give concrete examples of patients’ stories (of course, without divulging their real names), they make a list of traits for each one of the disorders, so that they’re easier to remember, and they tell us what is advisable and what is not recommended in each case. They also use humor and anecdotes, which makes the book easier to read even for a neophyte like myself. At the end of each chapter there is a short quiz for the readers to see if they suffer from that specific disorder. The causes of these...

This is a short fable about the unexpected changes that we have to face in our lives. It takes less than an hour to read, and I decided to do it because it was praised by self-help gurus and various famous people and managers. I wanted to know what all the fuss was about. It’s about four characters (two mice and two little people) who live in a maze (a metaphor for one’s life/job/organization/community etc.) and are forced to look for the cheese (a metaphor for what you want in life – a good job/relationship/money/health etc.) when it suddenly disappears. Each of the characters has a different way of dealing with this situation, two of them diametrically opposed – one completely refuses to accept it and to adapt, while another one ventures out on his own and eventually finds new cheese, pausing to write on the walls what he has learned along the way, hoping that this will help the others. Here is an interesting quote: He knew that when you change what you believe, you change what you d...